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[SYSTEMS ADMINS & IT MONKEYS] ...maybe they should have hired a professional

Considering the recent announcements of VSAN and NSX, I have some serious reservations about that judgment.

To VMWare's credit, they are still trying to innovate, but my personal experience is they're getting a little soft on their VM core product and the quality has gone downhill.

Maybe just anecdotes bein' anecdotes. Its not like I'm primed to jump ship for Hyper-V, but VMWare has seemed a bit less stable and reliable recently. It doesn't help when you attend VMWorld and they tell you that you should specifically not be using features like resource pools.

Never this. Never, never, never, EVER this. Software raid unloads all the processing and thinking about the raid from a little onboard piece of hardware that has no other function than to spend its little life devoting its meager brain power to controlling a raid, and places that onus on the operating system, which always has something better to do with its time.

It is, 100% of the time, a poorer performing solution that has the added joyous benefit of the raid shitting the bed if windows happens to.

I use software raid via Windows 7, via mirrored raid 1, and I think all home users should go this route.
If the drive dies, I can buy a new drive, any drive, any manufacturer, any size (as long as it's equal or bigger in size), pop it into my box, and Windows will just re-mirror, using the new drive.
If the machine crashes, I can pop out one drive, put it into another Windows box, and read the data.
No hardware compatibility crap to worry about.

In a hardware raid solution, you need the exact hardware when a raid drive dies, or when the raid controller dies.
As in, slightly different hard drives, and the raid controller will refuse to mirror.
Or if the raid controller dies, you need the exact same raid controller to read your hard drives.
If the machine dies, you might need the exact same machine to read your hard drives.
Basically, a ton of hardware compatibility issues to worry about.
Way too much of a headache for a home user.

So, how much CPU does Windows raid eat up? Almost nothing.http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=429
According to this testing, the difference between using Windows raid 1 vs a non-raid drive is under 1% CPU utilization most of the time.
The worst case is a sequential write scenario, where Windows raid 1 uses 2% more CPU than writing to a non-raid drive.

Out of curiosity, in the real world, how intensive is Exchange 2010/13? I've just finished my home lab and it's hosted on a VM with 4 cores and 4GB of RAM and performance has been dreadful. As soon as I have one user connected, the CPU usage spikes to 100% and stays there. It's even worse when I'm actually using the OWA. I guess that a dedicated email might lessen the load as Exchange doesn't have the handle the browser part?

I can't even imagine an enterprise with several thousands users who are all actively using email. Do you split roles and use beefy hardware for the intensive stuff?

So what backup solution do you sysadmin folks use at home?
I already use raid 1, a separate SSD for the OS, and lots of space allocated to shadow copy, but since I have 3 tb drives, backing up to dual layer blue ray is not practical.
All real soutions I've seen are out of budget for nearly all home users.
1.6 tb tape drives are $1000 with $30 tapes.
Duplicating data to a network drive means setting up FreeNAS with 2 or 3 tb drives in raid 1/5/6, yet another $1000 solution.
So what backup solution is practical at home?

So what backup solution do you sysadmin folks use at home?
I already use raid 1, a separate SSD for the OS, and lots of space allocated to shadow copy, but since I have 3 tb drives, backing up to dual layer blue ray is not practical.
All real soutions I've seen are out of budget for nearly all home users.
1.6 tb tape drives are $1000 with $30 tapes.
Duplicating data to a network drive means setting up FreeNAS with 2 or 3 tb drives in raid 1/5/6, yet another $1000 solution.
So what backup solution is practical at home?

Pretty much nothing.

The best answer I have is a fileserver, my laptop and my desktop and making sure important things are stored between all 3. Versioning? What's that - although I'm working on versioning, and my server has ZFS snapshots turned on as a practical emergency solution but it's not great.

My hopes I'm currently pinning on bup as a practical backup solution which I might actually recover data from.

So what backup solution do you sysadmin folks use at home?
I already use raid 1, a separate SSD for the OS, and lots of space allocated to shadow copy, but since I have 3 tb drives, backing up to dual layer blue ray is not practical.
All real soutions I've seen are out of budget for nearly all home users.
1.6 tb tape drives are $1000 with $30 tapes.
Duplicating data to a network drive means setting up FreeNAS with 2 or 3 tb drives in raid 1/5/6, yet another $1000 solution.
So what backup solution is practical at home?

I have a media server with 2 TB of data running server 2012 that backs up the other computers. I also use crashplan to back up offsite. I opted to use their seeding service for the first TB and then it took me 6 months or so to back up the non essential stuff.

I use carbonite home plus, i think i have about 6-8 TB's on it. Took me a couple of weeks to upload everything initially but totally worth it. Technically its 99$ per computer, but with some creative symbolic linking it backs up all my computers and my NAS for the price of one.

I have a 3TB external drive that uses its own shitty software to do a continuous backup. Don't have the money for any sort of NAS or the speed to do offsite.

And whoever mentioned StorageCraft, thank you! I'm going to pressure for the budget to get that put on our servers. I like the idea of a full migration between server versions. It does support tapes though right?

I honestly dont keep anything I would mind losing on my PC(IE not replaceable), so I don't really backup. If it were to change, I'd probably google drive it, and back it up on another pc. If I wanted to be serious, I would back it up to a fileserver in addition.

life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies

So what backup solution do you sysadmin folks use at home?
I already use raid 1, a separate SSD for the OS, and lots of space allocated to shadow copy, but since I have 3 tb drives, backing up to dual layer blue ray is not practical.
All real soutions I've seen are out of budget for nearly all home users.
1.6 tb tape drives are $1000 with $30 tapes.
Duplicating data to a network drive means setting up FreeNAS with 2 or 3 tb drives in raid 1/5/6, yet another $1000 solution.
So what backup solution is practical at home?

I'm with bowen where I keep important documents on Google Drive. I also have a free 10 GB space on A Drive where I backup pictures and such.
I'm a cheap bastard who's generally unimportant, just like my files

While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.

"I installed Good on my tablet and now I have to put in a passcode every time I turn it on. How do you turn that crap off?"
"You can't, when you installed good we installed a policy that requires a passcode."
"You guys are installing crap on my tablet? You took over my iPad? Get rid of it... now!"
"I can, but you are going to lose access to you company email, contacts and calendar"
"What! I'm going to email [IT Department head] and [CIO] letting them know how you treat us in the field...

(Sure thing and you will discover that [IT Department head] was the one who implemented this on behalf of our friends in Compliance. By all means though, I'm sure they want to hear your input)

This is just as bad as.

"Hello, I'm getting Good Error XXXX on my Droid"
"Did you root it?"
".....Yea?"
"That's the reason why, you need to reflash back to stock or it's not going to work"
"But I need the tethering!"
"You have to make a choice, Tethering or Email. Sorry."